In the interest of full disclosure: This is a collage of “a” day – just not “today”.

That’s because it is too cold to be hanging out in the studio for the moment, and also because I am going to spend the day at Kahve Dünyası (Coffee World) using their free Wi-Fi to download a lot of pics for presentations in Eskişehir (Omangazi Üniverstesi) and Ankara (Hacettepe University). HEY! As long as I’ll be enjoying free Wi-Fi (if in fact all is functioning), I’ll share some of them with y’all. But for now, here’s a collage on my own dime (or kuruş, to be precise) – my apologies for its fuzziness:

If you’re curious about the technique, well, the most interesting part is all that scumbly stuff on the bottom – well, it’s the back side of a used band of gold leaf – the light yellowish part is where there is still leaf on the tape – but it is the reverse side, so it is not shiny – and all the darker colored stuff is actually the watercolor on the paper underneath – now visible through the transparent band in the areas where the leaf was removed (pressed into some mixed-media work, no doubt).

25 March will be devoted to collage, on 26 March we will be making notebooks.
We’ll use the collages from the first day in the notebooks we will make on the second day
using 2 simple binding techniques – “Japanese” and “pamphlet”. In addition to basic techniques,
we’ll look into different aspects of creativity and “visual logic”.

Well, I’ll be on the road in a couple of weeks, with stops in Eskişehir and Ankara.

It started out as a simple trip to hang the Eco-Siklet Traveling Design Exhibit at the Büyülü Fener cinema in Kızılay, but it seemed a long way to go just to hang an exhibit, so I got to planning, and now…

In Ankara I’ll be giving 2 workshops – a collage workshop on 25 March, and a notebook workshop on 26 March, both at the Faberge Cafe in Kızılay. If you’re interested, just click on the picture below for workshop details (in Turkish – or contact me via email for details in English).

In Eskişehir I’ll be giving a talk on “Words in/as Art” at Osmangazi University.

I was particularly touched by a quote from Alan Kaprow that came from a

discussion on public art that I would file under the category “Art and Empathy”:

“This sense of what it means to be a social persona and the fact that every social persona has a private person inside is vital to the sense of community and to any meaningful sense of ‘public’ – of public service. The way to get to these issues sometimes is organizational and structural, but often it has to do with compassion, with play, with touching the inner self in every individual who recognizes that the next individual has a similar self.”